This page keeps you up-to-date on the latest and most innovative technologies in the Earth observation sector. The focus is on technologies that help make sense of the wealth of EO data that are available, new missions as well as other related data sources such as GNSS, space-based communications or UAVs that can be combined with EO data.

Earth Observation information services and products are in constant evolution. They cover the last mile towards the customer and are for many customers the most tangible result of remote sensing technology. Their innovative developments are largely dependent and based on the evolutions in new Missions, Imagery, etc. 

New Missions start with a vision to enable the development of future innovative EO capacities. Increasing performance and reduced cost/mass are important drivers for innovation in this section. One mission can cover a wide range of applications. Missions result in satellite imagery and data that are further developed into information services and products.

New technologies are being developed in terms of space-based satellite communications systems; more powerful processors, new encoding capabilities, and new user terminal capabilities that can make user systems more mobile, more versatile, more personally responsive, more powerful in terms of performance, and yet lower in cost.

Satellite imagery in remote sensing has four types of resolution: spatial, spectral, temporal, and radiometric. Spatial resolution is the pixel size of  the image, spectral resolution determines the number and type of available spectral bands, temporal resolution quantifies the revisit frequency of the satellite for a given location and radiometric resolution refers to the bit-depth of the image.

There are only 2 global operational Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS): the American GPS and the Russian GLONASS. The European Galileo positioning system is in its initial deployment phase and is expected to be operational in 2020. France, India and Japan are in the process of developing regional navigation systems. Satellite-AIS (Automatic Identification System) is an automatic tracking system used by ships. 

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle or drones are aircrafts without a human pilot on board. Its flight is controlled by computers integrated in the vehicle or from a distance through the control of a pilot on the ground. Legislation often runs behind Innovation in this sector. The highly detailed and very localized data collection forms an interesting complementary with Satellite Missions.